"Fiat money is backed by men with guns; Bitcoin is not. So why should this thing have any value?"--Uber statist economist Paul Krugman.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Truth in advertising: not everybody who tried to sting ACORN ended up with what they thought....

... and this story is actually about ACORN Delaware.

Nancy Armstrong is a disabled USN vet and a blogger out of Wichita KS, who is interested in investigating ACORN's funding sources. She is far less sensational than most, and--a pleasant rarity in the world today--actually reports factual information that would run counter to her original thesis.

Armstrong apparentely attempted her own sting operation in June 2009 to discover what kind of response people who turn to ACORN for mortgage foreclosure help get.

What drew me to this post is that her target was ACORN Delaware. [Who knows why a woman in Kansas calls ACORN Delaware?]

Here's what she writes:

ACORN has become directly involved in stopping foreclosures by doing foreclosure counseling with “housing experts.” Recently I spoke with the ACORN Delaware office purposely representing myself as a person who is in foreclosure in the State of Delaware to elicit details of the counseling. The polite and knowledgeable representative in the ACORN Delaware office answered my questions in full.

I told her that I needed to forestall a foreclosure. She informed me there were documents that I need to provide to the ACORN office to go “through the foreclosure counseling process.”

Here is a list of those items I needed to provide at “my appointment”:

1. Current mortgage statement2. 2008 Federal Tax Return3. Sheriff’s Sale Date4. Current W-25. If you are disabled they require the follwing documents:

And for an intake interview, look at the documents required. Precisely what you would expect for somebody to make an initial determination of whether they could help you.

But, strangely enough, no major blogs or outlets for the MSM have ever picked up Ms. Armstrong's post.

Sometimes that can be written off to the fact that there is no news when things go the way they are supposed to go, but in this case it is also possible that ACORN has simply become to radioactive for the MSM to handle in any objective fashion. It's not middle class. It's pretty radical in its approach to a lot of issues. It has ugly corners while it is arguably doing some good work.

Easier to go with the pimp and the prostitute who were no more real than Ms. Armstrong's fictive Delaware citizen in foreclosure.

Here's my challenge for the members of our local blogosphere: if you are going to write about ACORN, write [as pretty much only Nancy Willing has heretofore done] about what's going on at ACORN Delaware. What are they doing and how well are they doing it?